There are many things you should do on your resume, but there are also a lot of mistakes to avoid on your resume!
Knowing what mistakes to avoid when building your resume will help you to create a more successful resume.
Below you will find a few mistakes to avoid when you are building your resume! These mistakes could be made by anyone and often occur when you use resume templates you find online.
Mistake 1: Using Too Much Color
Your resume is a professional document that summarizes your previous work experiences. It isn’t exactly the best place to be trying out new fun-colored fonts.
You also shouldn’t be using a background color or making your page a different color.
These things can be really distracting to the person reading your resume, and it may give them a negative impression of you before even meeting you!
Instead, opt for a plain white resume with black font. This is simple and easy to read and helps make your resume look professional!
Mistake 2: Using Easy Skills
Everyone should have skills on their resume somewhere, whether that is a dedicated skills section or mixed in with your role descriptions.
But, you shouldn’t use skills that everyone has! You want to make sure you are using skills that are relevant to the position you are applying to!
What does this look like?
Well, you know that you should be using skills all over your resume, not just in your skills section. But there are some “skills” that you should avoid using because they are overused and don’t actually show what you can do.
Here are some skills to avoid:
- Helped
- Supported
- Responsible for
- Hard-working
Instead, try to include technical skills all throughout your resume, and especially in your skills section! For more information about formatting your skills section and some examples of hard and soft skills, check out this blog post!
Mistake 3: Including Irrelevant Experience
The main goal of your resume is to summarize your relevant professional experiences, so you want to avoid any irrelevant experience.
Avoiding irrelevant experience means not including everything you have ever done on your resume. If you’re in the later years of college or a college graduate, you definitely don’t need to include your high school experience on your resume.
You also don’t want to include irrelevant professional experience. Try to include all the professional experience you have related to the position you are applying to.
Mistake 4: Including a Headshot
Something you definitely don’t want to include on your resume is a headshot. Having a picture of yourself on your resume may evoke certain emotions in the person reading your resume, which you never want.
You want the person reading your resume to be judging you based on your experiences, not on your face!
If the person reading your resume likes it, they will probably look you up on LinkedIn, allowing them to see a picture of you!
Mistake 5: Multiple Pages
Your resume is supposed to be a summary of your professional experiences, so it should only really only be one page.
If your resume ends up being more than one page, it probably won’t get read! If you find that your resume is running onto a second page, you can adjust the margins to try and keep it at one page. In a standard document, the margins are usually set at 1 inch. You change the margins to be set to a smaller size, like .5 inches, to try and keep all your information on one page!
Mistake 6: Not Using Metrics
In each section of your resume, you will have bullet points explaining what you accomplished in each position. In these bullet points, you should include metrics!
For the accomplishments you are describing, try to quantify what you did. Did you sell a certain number of products? Maybe you designed a specific number of flyers or posters or updated a number of systems.
Using numbers in your descriptions of your accomplishments helps draw the person reading your resume to that description. This is beneficial because it will make your resume stand out more!
What’s Next?
Now that you know what mistakes to avoid when you are building your resume, you can begin to build your resume with confidence. You know what to avoid when building your resume, and this will help you feel more confident in what you are including on your resume!
If you want more information and a step-by-step guide about how to build your resume, download “The Easy Resume Guide” for free below!